Fox News has a thing about Bigfoot. The sensationalizing news organization’s producers are drawn to the subject and repulsed by it. It is as if after they have made a programming decision to embrace the topic, they find themselves in a nightmare and turn on the concept they have created.

Fox News staff are enchanted by Bigfoot, but then send out waves of ridicule onto the subject, as often as possible.

If I seem a little bitter at Fox, perhaps I am a bit. Every emotional feeling has a history. Here’s mine.

In 2005, if you will recall, I was caught up in the incorrect misunderstanding that the media promoted about a million dollar reward for the killing or capture of Bigfoot. Nothing like that was ever announced. It began in Texas with some pre-announcement words about Bigfoot, money, and proof. There really was suppose to be a prize for a photograph leading to the final, ultimate proof of a cryptid – any one of them – by Wizards of the Coast’s Magic Cards division. Some way it got tied to only one unknown animal – Bigfoot – and to only one outcome for that creature – death!

The reality was that the prize money wasn’t about bringing back a body. About $10,000 in prize money was finally given away in WoC’s announced contest for the submitted creative crypid photos.

But the killing part was never part of it. Wizards of the Coast started worrying that people would be killed trying to kill what they thought was a Bigfoot. A stampede to the imagined killing fields of the Pacific Northwest was predicted.

What became difficult to kill, however, was the rumor about the taking out of a Bigfoot for a million bucks. This was all real news, by then. A counter-campaign was needed, and WoC called on me to assist them out, before someone got injured.

The Bigfoot story became such hot news that, with my Bigfoot! book in hand, I was flown to the Big Apple to appear on the morning news program, “Fox and Friends” on the Fox Channel. I was going to talk about the reality of Bigfoot, as well as the fact there was no million dollar bounty to kill a Bigfoot.

I was put up in a nice New York City hotel overnight. I taken by a car service to the Fox News building, and asked to calmly wait in the Green Room for my appearance. For over a day, and then intensively, for an hour, Fox News promoted the segment with the usual teaser. You know which one.

The metaphoric carnival barker’s visual was the footage of the Patterson-Gimlin film. Bigfoot and an expert would be on in 45 minutes, then 30, and finally 15 minutes, the cluttered prep room’s little television kept bursting forth with excited banter.

The Green Room wasn’t anything fancy, but two attentive production assistants asked me if I needed anything often, as I arranged my required props for the show on a table that was said to mirror the one that would be in front of me. I’d flown to New York with the full skull reconstruction of Gigantopitchecus and Bigfoot track casts. The sour faces of the Transportation Security Administration immediately did not want those artifacts to clear airport security, thinking the replica skull was “real,” and, then after they did let me pass, yelled out to other TSA agents to come look and laugh at this guy with the “Bigfoot stuff.” I’m use to it.

Anyway, “Fox and Friends” was going to have me on any minute. Ooops. My appearance was delayed. Who was this new guy in the Green Room with me?

It was none other than my former Senator from my own state of Maine, George Mitchell. Wow, now that’s super boring. I said to myself, if I’m going to be here for a celebrity sighting, why couldn’t the TV gods have sent me Jennifer Lopez, with whom I could discuss Chupacabras sightings? And what was Mitchell doing here anyway? He wasn’t scheduled to be on, unless, my word, did he have some Bigfoot insights, perhaps about them taking steriods?

Not a good sign, this Mitchell fellow, being escorted from the room so quickly. Out walked George Mitchell, and I never made it out of the room.

As it turned out, despite the cheery teasers about Bigfoot, Mr. Sasquath and I were officially bumped from the show in the last five minutes of the “Fox and Friends” last hour. All this waiting for nothing.

Why and by whom? It all happened because of the Georges, the Fox people told me: George Bush had nominated another right-wing Supreme Court Justice and George Mitchell talked right through my segment about the left-wing reaction to that nomination. Maybe Bigfoot some other day soon, someone half-jokingly said to me as I was hurried out the side. “Yeah, right,” I mumbled under my breath.

I was shown the door, without even a sincere apology offered. This is the way the news business is, and you are required to have a hard shell if you work often with cable media. I knew that. Still, what an enormous waste of time; nothing educational came out of this trip, at all.

Hey, after all, to them, anyone discussing Bigfoot is just talking about “soft news.” Now, if I had been there discussing Paris Hilton, that would be another matter, I guess.

Fox News doesn’t really care about Bigfoot, of course. I learned this lesson deeply in 2005. Below, this most recent Fox video reinforces that point. It is the new 2007 footage of Matt Moneymaker being interviewed via the phone. My empathy to Matt Moneymaker, in this specific situation.

Moneymaker’s “interview” is a comedic tragedy, complete with a fade out, as it ends, with the sounds from the studio of laughter. How sad it has come to this kind of treatment so routinely.

About Loren ColemanLoren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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20 Responses to “Bigfoot & Moneymaker on Fox Video”

Just watch. When Bigfoot is actually proven, all those in the public eye who laughed at the possibility of Bigfoot, will turn tail and state that they always knew Bigfoot was real. Perhaps we should start a confirmed list of Bigfoot doubters today? That way we can corner them later so they have to eat their words and laughter.

it really is a sad state of affairs when people (regardless of who they are) are ridiculed for searching for the ultimate proof of the existence (or non-existence) of any animal. You don’t see people laughing at the researchers out to prove that Ivory-bills still exist….

I commented on this the other day after seeing the “Interview” with Moneymaker. Anyway, I also remarked about Shepard Smiths snidely announcement that Bigfoot was finally put to rest with Ray Wallace’s passing… As If… So, I would like to officially nominate Smith as one of the first forced to publicly eat Crow when BF’s existence is proved beyond doudt. Next would be that Blondie brain and her pal from Fox that couldn’t stop giggling the other night, And also Rob McConnel of wanna be Art Bell talk radio fame. Any additions?

First off, I watch Fox News. I like Trace Gallahger (SP?), the guy doing the interview. I don’t like the way he interviewed Moneymaker. He should have at least acted sorta interested in what was being said. The problem with most of the “I don’t care, Bigfoot’s stupid” closed-minded skeptics is that they treat anyone who does think that there’s a possibility of existence as if they are unintelligent & uninformed. They don’t understand that if there is a creature out there, it’s not some type of fantasy novel monster, but nothing more than a Gorilla-type animal. It’s all a lack of understanding and incorrect stereotypes. By the way, not all conservatives are as uninviting & ridiculing.

Gotta hand it to Matt, I think he handled those snarky, airheaded, make-up encrusted media puppets pretty well. It’s always tough because they can cut you off and they talk in sound bites every day, but in my opinion he held his own.

Why do an interveiw with Fox? Fox is not serious about the subject. What was the goal of the interveiw for Moneymaker? What was the goal for Fox News? Fox met their goal: entertainment. Moneymaker might have wanted to raise awareness about Bigfoot but he ended up just being fodder. His expeditions end up selling out. He doesn’t need publicity.
However the interview did raise some interesting questions for Bigfoot Research.
One is: as researchers we need to dedicate ourselves to getting out into the field at least twice a year. The more people we have in the field the more likely we are to get the evidence it’s going to take to prove existance. If the Pand G film doesn’t prove existence my cheap video camera ain’t going to do it.
We need a centralized data base of all reports to be able to track migration and populations then we can send people into the field into areas where there is more likely to be activity. One place in a state isn’t enough we need stations set up within a state.

I thought Matt did a great job in this case. He was completely off balance by the hosts transparent attempt to make a joke out of the entire research process but he came off much more credible than they did.

Cable news is vulnerable to fluff and they thought they had the leader of the whacko bigfoot brigade sitting in his closet wearing a tinfoil hat and typing away on his four page quarterly newsletter.

This is certainly typical of most cable news media and it’s one of the ongoing traits that make us seem so silly and superficial to the rest of the world.

hey craig & everyone i guess tommarrow morning on fox & friends on fox news channel there will another new bigfoot segment lets hope it will be better this time. people here should email fox news channel or fox & friends with nuteral nice comments or opinion about the sasquatch pheanomena if you all want too ok. thank you bill green

In the panic leading up to the latest sham profit war, I watched (and recorded) hundreds of hours of their staff laughing at people who said that Iraq did not have huge stockpiles of WMD’s and was not involved in the 9/11 attacks. So many times I saw them make fun of people who said that maybe that banner was wrong, and perhaps the mission was not really “accomplished”. Recollections of their 2000 trumpeting of the “return of integrity” to the White House now ring as side-splittingly hilarious.

If that’s how they handle the most pressing issues of our time (and, after being proven WRONG again and again, they simply apply more spin), how on Earth can anyone expect an evenhanded treatment of BF from these blatant hacks? I mean, come on now!

This was taken all as a big joke – a time filler to keep things rolling between orgies of saturation coverage of things insignificant. Their gyrations while striving to avoid substantially discussing anything of substance are beyond obvious to anybody with two brain cells, and the plastic talking heads that spew out the daily drivel are among the most ignorant adults I’ve ever seen. They rarely go even a few minutes without exposing their painful lack of knowledge. Among the many examples, I especially enjoy their referring to NASA as Nassau, or the obligatory reference to Africa (which has no tigers) whenever there is a story with a tiger.

It’s been proven again and again that Fox News viewers are the bottom of the heap, much less likely to answer questions about news issues correctly. That’s not an accident, but rather a paradigm that’s been painstakingly constructed by a team of marketers that excels at tweaking our most simple-minded knuckle-draggers. In that respect, they’ve done a damn fine job. A nice cold beer/poolside chat with a devoted Fox News viewer reliable reveals a person who knows nothing outside of their job, hobbies, and sports and, often, outright hostility toward those who use their intellect.

When people whose outdoor experience peaked on a golf course overwhelmingly believe in angels, yet declare BF an impossibility amid sophomoric chuckles, you know you’re not dealing with the sharpest knives in the drawer.

Moneymaker did a decent job in dealing with those idiots, but the quality of an interview depends mostly on the interviewer, not the guest. When they waste their time suggesting that armchair researchers are waiting for the BF to come to their homes, it’s illustrative of the tactics Fox ALWAYS uses when dealing with any guest who strays from the narrow view of the god, country, and family crowd. And, as already noted, they keep suffering the indignity of being proven wrong over and over again, but, thanks to the short memories of their fans, it really doesn’t matter.